Peter Chianca: Driving search yields tales of the erratic

Monday

Apr 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMApr 27, 2009 at 11:31 PM

Yesterday I drove on Route 114 in Peabody, Mass. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a road where cars careen into high-speed traffic like shiny balls bouncing around a pinball machine. It’s the type of road you only go on when you forget that other roads exist, or that you could have stayed home.

Peter Chianca

Yesterday I drove on Route 114 in Peabody, Mass. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a road where cars careen into high-speed traffic like shiny balls bouncing around a pinball machine. It’s the type of road you only go on when you forget that other roads exist, or that you could have stayed home.

As I dodged the cars that were changing lanes, slowing down and speeding up, putting on blinkers to nowhere and flying on and off the highway like they were being chased by giant hornets, I wondered, why? Why are these people driving as if someone just told them they had 15 minutes to live? (Granted, the road’s designed so that if you don’t, they’ll someday find your skeletal remains waiting to make a left turn out of Walgreens.)

Being a journalist, I decided to do some serious journalistic research into this. In other words, I looked on the Internet. And I turned up several possible reasons for erratic driving, even beyond the old standbys of controlled substances, cell phones, or using cell phones while on controlled substances.

For instance, the drivers in question may be rush-hour stunt bikers. I’m referring of course to “MI Xtreme,” the illegal motorcycling club in Florida known, according to Ananova news service, for performing “high-risk maneuvers during rush-hour traffic.” As if just living in Florida isn’t “high-risk” enough — it’s the only place in America where you can actually get shot to death by an alligator.

Another possibility is that people are driving in cars filled with dogs. This happened in Germany recently, when a woman in a Volkswagen crashed into another driver while sharing her car with six canine companions. It couldn’t have helped that all six were probably trying to stick their heads out the windows at the time, but who knows? Maybe they were fighting over the radio station.

But then I came across another, more likely explanation for erratic driving. A recent survey showed that one in five drivers has, shall we say, “gotten romantic” with a passenger while attempting to drive at the same time. This is something that people are almost never asked to do on a driver’s test.

The study also says that one in two drivers have, um, gotten romantic with themselves behind the wheel, and the same number has engaged with a passenger in a certain related activity; I’ll just say it was brought to mainstream attention by a certain past Democratic president. That’s right, lying under oath.

I started doubting the veracity of the study, though, when I read that only four in 10 people say they’ve eaten a burger while driving. I find it hard to believe more drivers are engaging in the aforementioned ex-presidential activity than are eating hamburgers — I mean, they don’t even have a drive-through for that.

So I checked out the source of the survey, the magazine Max Power, whose Web site would indicate that a typical driver is a woman wearing nothing but computer-generated stars over her personal regions. I’m assuming this magazine’s readers would be disproportionately likely to partake in the surveyed activities, or at least say that they did.

So I guess I’m back to square one. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on my quest — in fact, my next step is to hole up somewhere for an extended period of time and give the issue some long, serious thought. If you need me, I’ll be in the left-turn lane in front of Walgreens.

Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. He’s currently on vacation; this column appeared originally in 2003. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca.

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